Traditional fantasy roleplaying games

Tag Archives: wilderness

Issue 5 is my favorite of the zine so far. If I had to pick, B/X would probably be my game of choice, and the bulk of this issue is dedicated to basic D&D hexcrawl content! It also has the best cover of all the Loviatars. I hope that Hex 001 is the start of a series of hex articles.

Hex 001 also introduced a new rule (to me at least) that I am considering adopting in general. There are four main encounter locations within Hex 001, and if the PCs investigate at least 3 of them, they get a “hex reward” (in this case, the reward is the companionship of a flying cat). I really like this. If I had to define D&D, I would not cite treasure, or fighting, or monsters, or even magic; I would point to the concept of exploration. I know that is not true for all players. In fact, most of my players seem to be most enthused by killing enemies and accumulating treasure. (Maybe that’s the difference between players who are at heart referees and players who are at heart adventurers?)

I’ve thought about giving XP for exploration in addition to treasure and defeating monsters, but I’ve never gotten around to actually trying it. I have given XP for completing particular journeys, but I’ve never generalized the rule. Giving XP for specific journeys is really too story-based for me now, so I don’t think I would do that again. Using hex rewards outside of the XP system is another interesting way of approaching rewarding exploration. The only question left is: how much metagame information about the incentive should be communicated to the players? On the one hand, saying that “there are four encounter zones to find here” seems to break immersion. But I do want players to know what they are being rewarded for. So I would probably compromise and explain the the general concept of hex rewards to players without going into detail.

In 1974 D&D, the assumed campaign setting is an expanse of chaotic wilderness with isolated domains controlled by powerful NPCs. High-level PCs might also at some point aspire to roll back part of the wilderness and carve out their own domain (rather detailed rules for doing this, including prices for components of strongholds are given in The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, pages 20 through 24). The assumption is that a dungeon will be located nearby the town where PCs start, and will occupy those characters for (at least) their first few levels. The overland wilderness is considered too dangerous for small parties of low level adventurers. A method is given for determining the residents of strongholds once the adventurers have graduated from dungeoneering (TU&WA pages 15 and 16). These articles contain a method for generating wilderness settings

Based on the scaffolding given in the 3 LBBs, Victor Raymond wrote a fantastic pair of articles for Fight On! that contain a method for generating wilderness settings. It is called The Wilderness Architect (found in issue 2 page 52 and issue 3 page 118) and is based on a thread at the ODD74 forums. They assume that the campaign starts in or near an existing stronghold, and have tools to determine the population of the stronghold (which in turn determines the lord’s tax base), how to distribute the population among villages, and how close other strongholds are (that which is not controlled by a stronghold is assumed to be chaotic wilderness). In essence, it is a mapping of social power centers.

As a side note, I think it is truly inspired to have the rules for creating strongholds for PCs be more or less the same as rules for creating strongholds that are encountered in the wilderness by PCs. I don’t think any other edition of D&D or game since then has really expanded on this idea, or at least none that I know of.

I want to place the dragons now because they’ll likely distort the social map. Few people want to live next-door to a dragon.

I think this idea of power centers can profitably be the guiding principle for wilderness setting design.

In addition to strongholds and monsters, I think there might be other things that might warp the surrounding area. Powerful artifacts, perhaps, or magical natural phenomena. A few ideas for other sources of chaotic influence:

Here I am considering elves part of the wilderness and therefor chaotic, though they are not necessarily wicked from a human perspective. Obviously, PC elves need not be pure agents of chaos (they are, after all, adventuring with humans by choice), but I at least would like them to be dangerous and alien.

This begs for a nice collection of tables that could be plugged into a system similar to The Wilderness Architect, but I’m not feeling all that creative right now, so I will leave that as an exercise for the reader (and maybe a future post).